Abstract

X-SAR's 12 meter long and 40 cm wide main transmit and receive antenna is mounted directly to a tiltable part of the SIR-C antenna truss structure in the Shuttle cargo bay. The second receive antenna is 6 meter long and is mounted together with the second C-band antenna to a 31 meter long deployable boom structure perpendicular to the velocity direction to build the baseline. X-SAR is not capable of operating in an Scan SAR mode like SIR-C to allow continuous coverage, but will operate in a high resolution mode with a swath width of 30-35 km. The engineering design of the interferometric configuration for X-SAR, the requirement specification and the predicted performance as well as the mission operation aspects are described in this paper.